


please don't be in love with someone else

by benwvatt



Series: each and every universe [4]
Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: F/M, artist!jake and artist!amy, marriage pact
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-07
Updated: 2018-01-06
Packaged: 2019-01-10 08:49:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 11,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12295653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/benwvatt/pseuds/benwvatt
Summary: “Amy Santiago, will you marry me when we’re thirty-five, given that we’re just as lonely as we are today?”Every ten years, something big happens between Jake and Amy. They're five when they meet, twenty-five when they pledge to marry each other if all else fails.





	1. one

The first time Amy Santiago sees Jake Peralta in a new light, he’s kneeling over a table in art class, holding a paintbrush so loosely it might as well fall out of his hands. It’s five o’clock in the afternoon, when people somehow find it in themselves to share words that’ve fallen dormant. She’s trying her luck at watercolors at the next desk, to no avail. The occasional car passes by, headlights casting shadows past the blinds.

There’s a sea-green creation on Jake’s page, trails of color blending into each other, and Amy undeniably knows she’s been bested.

He is fifteen years old and undeniably good at drawing mermaids. They are twisted and sunken and hollow-looking, smirking and open-eyed as if alive on the page. Amy frowns down at her own paper, a coarse, red lily wilting as its paint dries and darkens. Smears of the runaway hue run down the page; unbeknownst to her, there’s a pink line along her temple, left over from the moment she brushed her hair back into a bun.

Amy thinks back to elementary school, five years old as Mrs. Peralta teaches students how to draw a perfect circle. Good for him. Good for his masterpiece.

She takes a deep breath, swirls her brush in a cup of murky water, and looks around the art room for shades of green. She takes ten surveys of the room before awkwardly, furtively tapping the Peralta boy on his shoulder. It’s obvious he cares, the way his eyes have glossed over as he adds strokes of detail to the picture. He just doesn’t care about _her._ Jake doesn’t even register Amy’s presence until the brush is down and he’s mercilessly signed his name.

“Sorry.” His voice jars the quiet as he sets his work aside to pass her the paints. “I tend to zone out in places like these. My mistake.”

“It’s no issue.” She smiles back. “No issue at all.”

“You’re Amy, right? We have history class together?”

“Yeah. And you’re Jake?”

“That I am. My mom’s the first-grade art teacher.”

“I remember,” she replies, smiling softly. “You were the one who wasted a bottle of glue so you could peel it off of your hands.”

“And you got into a fight with Jenny Gildenhorn over the history of the pyramids, didn’t you?”

A grin pulls at Amy’s lips. “I don’t take art history lightly.”

“And I don’t take _forensics_ lightly,” Jake says, his ears turning slightly red as he smiles. “I was five. It was for fingerprinting.”

“If you say so.”

“I _do_ say so,” Jake responds, washing out his brushes before walking out of the art room. Amy meekly takes a picture of his painting before slipping away as well. She misses the trail of pink on her face as she walks out. It’s barely noticeable, anyway, what with the blush on her cheeks.

* * *

They really, _truly_ meet a few months later, seated across the room from each other in what can only be an abandoned classroom. Amy sends a glare Jake’s way (what? he never raises his hand in class) and he mouths a quick explanation. When the ‘Mission Impossible’ music plays overhead, speakers malfunctioning and the presenter uncomfortably trying to sing along, Amy bites the inside of her cheek trying not to burst into laughter. Jake inches closer and doodles little images of the detective on the NYPD pamphlet. Soon, Detective Christiansen is wearing a pair of spy sunglasses and the thickest, most unnecessary eye black he can think of.

“Never knew you could draw caricatures,” she scrawls onto a piece of paper, folding it. Santiagos aren’t normally scrawlers 一 there’s a reason they all have favorite fonts 一 but Jake Peralta’s worth making an exception.

“Never knew you had a sense of humor,” he writes back, erasing the edge of the detective’s face and sharpening his cheekbones. It’s an uncanny impression of someone he hasn’t known for five minutes.

Christiansen leaves, holding two ‘Junior Police Recruitment’ signups with pride, neither belonging to Jake nor Amy. Realistically, she should text her mom for a ride, but Jake says he’s walking home and she, all of a sudden, decides a few extra minutes can’t hurt.

“Before you go, show me how to draw?” Amy asks, pulling a sketchbook open from her book bag. She takes a graphite (yes, _graphite,_ it’s one of her pet peeves) pencil from behind her ear and hands it to Jake.

“Ames, Ames, Ames,” he coaxes, silently realizing they barely know each other and he (definitely) doesn’t have the liberty to nickname her. “You think we can go over that _before we go?_ This is art. Humans have waged wars over art, have fallen in love with paint and clay.”

“Calm down, _Michaelangelo._ You’re just a freshman. Show me, please?”

“Okay, but you have to admit I’d be a different ninja turtle than Mikey.” Jake grins, taking the pencil Amy hands him. “Art’s all about practice. Just get started and keep going.”

Amy rolls her eyes, but an odd peace settles over her heart as Jake draws a circle, then an oval and a jaw, then waxing moons for eyes. Before she knows it, Gina Linetti is smiling up at her from the page. “That’s … really good. You did that in, like, two minutes?”

“Well, you don’t have to sound so surprised about it,” Jake scoffs. “I’ve been friends with Gina for, like, years. Ages. A _decade._ Of course I know how to draw her.”

“What kind of advice is that? I think, if you’re a good artist, you just know how to draw people. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve known them.”

“Fine, I’ll prove it.”

Jake scrunches up his face in some distorted scowl, somehow squinting and winking all at once. His knuckles are quickly turning white, the pencil threatening to snap under his grip, as Amy slowly, poorly appears on the page. Her eyes are too far apart, the edges of her face improperly aligned as they grow smudged under the weight of Jake’s hand. He lets out an exhausted breath, letting the pencil drop and dapple Amy’s face one last time.

“You didn’t even try, you drama queen.” Amy crosses her arms. “Your eyes were closed!”

“Were not,” he mumbles.

“I look like a Picasso painting. My eyes aren’t even level. One of my ears is _between_ my mouth and my chin.”

“Well, if you’re going to have such high standards, you should seriously consider commissioning an artist...”

“Please draw me, Jake Peralta.” Amy chuckles. “Please show me. I can’t offer much in return, but I’d really, really like it.”

“When you say it like that,” Jake says, shutting one eye as he smiles and framing his friend’s face with his thumb and pointer finger L-shapes in the air, “how can I say no? Just hold still for me.”

Amy gulps quietly, craning her neck in the slightest way possible to see her face appear out of nowhere. She bites her tongue, seeing herself come into view with every scratch of pencil on paper. Peering at the final work, a casual reflection glances back, soft-eyed and rosy.

“That’s, um, really nice,” she admits, incomprehensibly able to resist the urge to say she told him so. Amy pulls at the hair ties around her wrist, speechless at Jake’s efforts. “Thank you. Really, I wish I could return the favor.”

“What, you can’t draw?” He frowns a little before laughing, a ridiculously good combination. “Everyone’s worth something. Even me.”

“Don’t say that,” Amy admonishes, something invisible tugging at her heartstrings. “Here, I’ll draw, I’m just … not the best at it. I’m more into art history.” Biting the inside of her cheek and twirling the end of the pencil around her fingers, she tries to keep from fidgeting.

“Okay, what would you say about this?” Jake points finger guns at his drawing of Amy, eliciting a laugh. “As an art _historian,_ you know. In your professional opinion.”

“Alright, I’d say you have composition down. Nice lines, nice anatomy. Your shading takes advantage of that negative space. Definitely a good handle on realism.” She pauses, smiling. “I’d know better than anyone else, right?”

“Right.” Jake looks up, alight with Amy’s compliment, glancing lovingly at the graceful streak of paint along her temple. “Do you want to keep it?”

“That’d - that’d be great.” She spins the pencil between her fingers yet again, shy to know him so well after a mere hour. “Um, you want to go now?”

Amy pulls her messy bun out of its tangle on her way out, tucking hair behind both ears as she and Jake walk out of the school. The motion leaves a smear of graphite along her neck. He compliments her sneakers as they walk to her house (“it’s closer! I don’t mind going out of my way to drop you off, Ames”) and they linger at the front door once they arrive. By now, the sun has halfway set, giving the cars along Amy’s street a dim silver lining.

 _“You’re_ a dim silver lining,” Jake retorts, upon Amy’s mention. “Well, I mean, you - you’re not dim at all. You do calculus practice problems during passing period, don’t you? And you made that art piece last year with blackout poetry from classic literature. So, I guess, you’re, um, my silver lining?”

“Smooth,” she giggles.

“Shouldn’t we go in?” he asks, avidly hoping to change the topic.

“I have seven older brothers. The minute anyone sees you, there’ll be about a million questions. My brothers will call you ‘bro’ and my parents will arrange a marriage with your parents or … something like that.” Amy’s voice stutters off into the distance near the second half of her sentence. “I’m just preparing to you face them, okay?”

From the window facing the door, the blinds are pulled up and Amy’s mother peers through. “Hi!” she shouts, breaking the barrier between her, her daughter, and a few inches of glass and metal. “Would you like to come in?”

“Mom, just open the door,” Amy answers, reaching into her backpack for her key.

“What’s _your_ name? I’m Camila Santiago!”

Frustratedly, Amy unlocks the front door and beckons Jake in. “You know you can get the door open from the inside, right?”

“Where’s the fun in that?” Her brother Luis mutters off to the side, only halting at the staircase when he catches a glimpse of the Santiagos’ guest. “Wait. Jake Peralta? From the park?”

“Um...”

Amy’s mother snaps her fingers. “That’s how I know you! You’re that kid Luis and Vic always play hacky sack with! What’re you doing here?”

“He walked home with me,” Amy responds. “We go to school together.”

“How sweet,” Camila says. “Would you like to stay for dinner, Jake?”

“Would you like to stay forever?” Luis chimes in, smugly grinning and making a heart in his hands.

“Uh, dinner sounds great. I’ll just text my mom and tell her,” Jake replies. “You’ll have to wait and see about that second option, though.”

* * *

“Why are you so sad? It’s your _birthday,”_ Amy frowns, folding her arms across her chest with cold as she sits on the park bench near the precinct. “You’re twenty-five! Live a little!”

“Hypocrite. Your birthday’s tomorrow, and you don’t seem excited, either. You’re twenty-four! _Live_ a little!” Jake mocks, raising the pitch of his voice.

“Very funny,” Amy retorts, rubbing her eyes as the lights of the city flicker, carried out by passing cars. “Come on, Jake, quit lingering and sit down next to me. We have the rest of the night off! We could stay up late talking, if you want.”

“Like we used to, right?”

“We still do it,” Amy scoffs, “just, you know, less.”

“Title of your sex tape,” Jake blurts, familiarly smirking. His face is still visible amidst the haze of the darkness. “You walked right into that one.”

“Fine,” Amy concedes, hiding a smile from her friend. “But don’t tell me you didn’t need this. You’ve been kind of out of it today, haven’t you?”

A stagnant pause sits in the air, wind blowing past their backs, before Jake sighs. “My dad got remarried today. He sent me an invite on Facebook. Surprise, I didn’t RVSP.”

Amy doesn’t dare correct him. Shivering slightly and pulling her cardigan tighter around her waist, she waits for Jake to resume. She knows him well enough to expect a few follow-up insults after a statement like ‘my dad’s getting married today’ (it’s Roger’s fourth wedding, as if she can be surprised after years of hearing about his antics.)

“He got together with a passenger. I bet she flirted her way into first class or joined the mile-high club with him or something,” Jake says under his breath, a hint of caustic exhaustion hiding behind every word. “You should’ve seen their invitation. They looked so happy, pretending to walk down the aisle. It just made me wonder, you know, how he’d be so lucky as to get _four_ women to marry him. I wonder if I’ll even get married. Just once.”

“You’re only twenty-five. You have plenty of time.”

“Yeah, and I’m wasting it all in overtime. Name the last time I even went on a date.”

Amy bites her lip. “You’re not _wasting_ it, you’re catching perps and making Brooklyn safer. And, besides, your last date was four months and two days ago. It’s not the end of the world.”

“You’re unbelievable.” Jake grins. “How d’you even remember that?”

“Well, to be truthful, I was kind of … jealous the last time you got a date. I haven’t gone out with someone in, like, seven months,” Amy says, staring at the ground between her feet. The dirt’s cracking with age, the August heat affecting even New York. “Try watching all seven of your brothers become fiancés, then husbands, then fathers. Try going to family reunions alone.”

“If you want, we could … sort of insure ourselves, I guess, against dying alone.”

“Yeah, like that’s a _thing,”_ Amy grumbles.

“I mean, we could … marry each other.”

A single car coasts by, silver by nature and grey with dust, casting light around the curbside. Amy’s throat feels dry, her heart somehow sunken in her chest. Their conversation seems stuck in time as Jake removes his arm from around her neck; she silently curses at the loss of his warmth, unwilling to ask him to return.

“Of course, Ames, not _now-”_

“Well, _that’s_ a relief.”

“Like, in ten years. Far, far off in the distance. What do you say?”

“It sounds like a good idea,” Amy concedes, tucking a flyaway strand of hair back behind her ear. “We both want the same things, right? Kids? A house? Good careers?”

“Right,” Jake replies, draping his jacket over Amy’s shoulders. She laughs a little, burying her hands in his pockets and finding gum wrappers (“you never know when you might need gum!” “one day, you’re going to wash your jacket and get gum stuck to the inside” “joke’s on you, I never wash my jacket”) and a red velvet box.

“Did you plan this?” she asks, wide-eyed.

“Maybe.” He clicks the box open, taking a tarnished ring and slipping it onto Amy’s finger. “Amy Santiago, will you marry me when we’re thirty-five, given that we’re just as lonely as we are today?”

“That’s a pretty poor proposal,” she says, looking at the aged gem in the glow of the streetlight. “I’m saying yes anyway."


	2. two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Why do I have to take your name, Amy _Peralta?_ You have seven brothers, I’m an only child!”

Amy walks into the precinct on her twenty-fifth birthday twisting a garnet ring around her fourth finger. Its silver band winks in the light of the window, catching her partner’s eye. They’re now partners in two walks of life, she supposes, given the nature of her awful dating life. Disagreeable nature. Misfortune. Any way she puts it, Amy’s technically taken.

“Engaged, huh?” Jake asks, strolling in a smooth five minutes after the clock strikes nine. “Your fiancé must have good taste.”

“No, he said he found this in the evidence lockup.” Amy shrugs, still fixated on the way the gem reflects the Nine-Nine’s electric lights. “Didn’t stop me from saying yes, anyways.”

“Sounds like a nice guy.”

“Trust me,” Amy replies, smiling, “He is.”

She fiddles with the token of her marriage all day, never daring to take it off for fear of losing the post-engagement (is that what she’s seriously calling it?) blur of emotions. Admittedly, it’s nice to act as if she isn’t single anymore. Amy slips Jake a black velvet box under the desk, watching as he cracks it open. 

“This better not get stuck,” he murmurs, pocketing the box. “Where’d you even get a men’s engagement ring at, like, two in the morning?”

“I have my sources,” Amy mutters. “Okay, fine, I couldn’t sleep, so I went for a drive and found a 24-hour jewelry store in Livingston, New Jersey. Happy?”

“Of course I’m happy,” he replies, pretending to tear up as he reaches to her. “Yes, yes, a thousand times yes!”

Amy makes a point of clinking her ring against Jake’s. They hold hands across the desk before falling apart once more. She’d never tell him, but she misses the way his thumb rubs over hers. If not for the gap between them, she’d hold his hand all day.

* * *

The jewel catches Charles’ eye at half past five, the number blinking in neon green on the car’s clock. He slams on the brakes as they drive home from interviewing a suspect, making sure he isn’t seeing a mirage as they park at a gas station.

“Amy, that isn’t-” he stutters, watching a car pull up behind them.

“Kind of,” she bashfully replies, refusing to make eye contact.

“Who?!”

A car horn beeps loudly, repeatedly, from behind, obnoxious LED highlights rendering Charles’ rearview mirror useless. Gina’s voice pierces the air. “Move! Or I’ll move your car _for_ you!”

“Amy got engaged! As in, to be wed! I’m allowed to go a little slower!” Charles retorts, unlocking the car door with one hand. He peers down at the ring, red and silver against all else, before Amy pulls away and starts to play with it again.

“Excuse me?” The headlights die as Gina gets out of her car, her many keychains all jingling against each other before a slam resounds. “Open up.”

“I’m terrified that Eleanor wants a divorce and that she and Hercules will kick me out,” Charles blurts. “I should’ve noticed when she said ‘I suppose’ at our wedding.”

“Not you!” Gina exclaims, pulling at the car door until her knuckles turn white. She glances behind her back, making sure nobody else is behind them in line for gas, before reaching through the window and one-handedly grabbing Charles by the collar. “Open up so I can see Amy! So she can tell us who proposed to her, when she hasn’t had a date in seven months!”

“Aw, you remembered!” Amy says, reaching across the gearshift to roll down the driver’s window and show Gina her left hand. She doesn’t dare take it off. “Wait, is that a good thing?”

Gina releases Charles, unlocking the car doors and climbing into the backseat with ease. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a good thing or not. You’re engaged, Ames!”

“About that…” Amy winces. “I’m not _technically_ engaged? I made a marriage pact. With Jake. In ten years. Sorry to let you guys down.”

“Jake?” Charles asks, wide-eyed, as Gina gets her phone out and loudly asks Siri to calculate how many days the next decade holds. (According to Siri, it’s 3,650, although Amy really knows the number should go up by two to account for leap years.)

“It was last night.” Amy sighs, still unable to keep from fidgeting with the ring. “We stayed up talking on that bench outside the precinct. He asked me, and I - I said yes.”

Realistically, the engagement is an afterthought, a safety net, the last thing she should fixate on, but she wants, even needs to act like a fiancée should: ‘Say Yes to the Dress’-level perfectionism, the seemingly simple choice between white and off-white themes. She’s always been the bridesmaid, never the bride. It’d be nice, just once, to throw the bouquet rather than dodging it 一 yes, dodging, she didn’t want her mom getting any ideas and setting her up on yet more blind dates.

“Do you think you’ll really marry Jake?” Charles asks, softly knocking his shoulder against Amy’s. They both know what she’s thinking.

Here’s hoping.

* * *

“You proposed to your best friend?” Terry asks.

Jake nods, weakly holding his left hand up.

“Last night? After everyone left? Outside, with the city lights, like you two were in a Nancy Meyers film or a Nicholas Sparks novel?”

“Yep.”

“And you’re wearing the ring the day after the quote-unquote engagement? Isn’t the pact your last resort?” Terry frowns. “You wear that now, you deter every potential date for the next ten years.”

Sighing, Jake curses under his breath. “I can’t take it off now! What if I hurt Amy’s feelings? What if she expects me to follow through and marry her?”

“Your wedding couldn’t be further off,” Terry deadpans. “Listen, it’s not my business how you two are doing relationship-wise, but you should tell Amy how you feel.”

“I mean, I’m not into her or anything,” Jake scoffs, looking lost as he stares at his shoes. “I’m just … relatively attracted to her. As a human being. As a concept. You know how it goes.”

“I _used_ to know, Jake. That’s why I got married.”

* * *

“So, there was a B&E at Shaw’s Bar,” Charles explains, switching the turn signal on as he pulls into the parking lot, “We have to go check it out. Standard protocol.”

“Charles, we know what protocol is,” Jake rolls his eyes from the backseat, twisting the engagement ring with thumb and forefinger while trying not to move. Amy’s asleep on his chest (she murmured something about New Jersey traffic before dozing off) in the most comfortable sense, her head under his chin and ear pressed against his chest. If she weren’t practically unconscious, she’d notice on Jake’s rapid heartbeat.

She insisted on sitting in the middle seat when she got in the police car 一 something about the increased visibility, given her stature without heels 一 and, over the course of the ride to Shaw’s, has crept closer to Jake’s side. As the car jostles on a turn, Amy awakens, bleary-eyed as she replaces sleeptalk with gentle speech. Charles departs, saying something about police tape before he slams the door and tell them it’ll be a second.

“What time is it?” Amy mumbles.

“Half past nine,” Jake responds, circling an arm around her waist (really, it’s to keep _her_ warm, she’s always cold in the precinct) as he buries his nose in her hair. “You still tired?”

“Kinda.” She muffles a yawn. “We caught the guy, right? Leonard Smits, sixty years old? Tall, bald guy?”

“Not even close. We’re sitting in the parking lot, waiting for Charles.” Jake laughs. “Were you dreaming about making an arrest again?”

“Could you tell?” Amy asks, apologizing as Jake nods.

She pulls him closer, her left hand pressed into his body while her right drapes over his neck, until Jake recoils in pain. “Your ring’s gonna leave a bruise on my collarbone. If I’d known you’d do this the night after I proposed, I would’ve gotten a different one,” he jokes. “Serves me right.”

“Yeah, thanks for _nothing._ All you did was make me the happiest fiancée in Brooklyn.” Amy slightly grins up at Jake, taking his hand in hers. She wouldn’t normally agree to marry any of her friends, but he’s worth making an exception.

“Just the happiest in Brooklyn? We’re going to have to go up to NYC and set some records.”

“Sounds good. We could make a trip out of-”

“Guys!” Charles calls, running out to the car. “I could really use your help with this. Amy was sleeping so I didn’t want to disturb you, but she’s awake now!” He darts away as quickly as he came, kicking up dust in the parking lot as he departs.

Amy yawns before rolling off of Jake, flipping her ring the other way so its garnet flickers in the moonlit evening once again. “Come on, we should get going. Act surprised, okay?”

“They’ve _only_ been doing this for every birthday someone has. You think this is an unrehearsed reaction?” Jake retorts, combing his fingers through his ruffled hair. “Hang on. There’s something on your temple, Ames. Is that blood?”

“I … may have stayed up extra late last night painting mermaids.” Amy flusters, scraping at the pink mark atop her skin and pulling her hair out of its now-loose ponytail. “There, um, may or may not be a couple watercolors of us. You know how it is.”

“Sure thing, _Michaelangelo.”_ Jake smirks, pushing a flyaway out of Amy’s face. “We have an impromptu B &E-slash-birthday-party to attend. Care to join me?”

* * *

It isn’t hard to feign surprise when Shaw’s Bar has been decorated in shades of silver and navy blue, a proud balloon arch standing above the doorway just waiting to invite them in. Their birthday cake is a comical blue (“mom! it’s how Percy Jackson would’ve wanted it!” Amy remembers yelling) and stands adorned with twenty-five matching candles.

“Happy birthday to the woman a day younger than me,” Jake toasts, clinking a shot against Amy’s before going around the group and doing the same. They down their drinks together, confetti and rainbow sprinkles spotting the tables. “To ten more years, and to the ten after that.”

“To three-thousand-day promises.” Gina raises a glass. “To growing up together and growing old together.”

“To knowledge. To the game cops and robbers, but we’re always on the same side.” Amy cheers, one drink already coursing through her system. “And by the way, Gina, it’s three-thousand, six-hundred, and fifty- _two_ days. Just to let you know.”

Charles hits a spoon against his half-empty glass, glitter somehow speckling his shoulders. “To Jake and Amy! To progress, to growth, and to patience. Rosa, you’re next!”

“Do I have to make a toast, too? Can’t we just drink in silence?” Rosa complains, edging away from her stance once she sees Amy’s aloof smile and the ring on her hand. “Um, to the future. To working hard and working well.”

“That was the structure of _my_ sentence!” Gina exclaims. “My girlfriend is a plagiarist. The best and worst crime to commit.”

“Says the civilian administrator,” Rosa mocks. “Not like you’d know the crimes anyways.”

“Not like you’re breaking about ten laws, carrying a piece of barbed wire and an eleven-inch pocketknife around like they’re your life’s blood,” Gina taunts.

“Excuse me, it’s _thirteen_ inches. Get your facts straight.”

“None of us are straight.” Gina cheers, swiping a shot from the next table over. “That’s the beauty of this.”

Rosa mutters, “Thievery’s a crime, babe,” as she rolls her eyes and calls for another round. “To getting Gina drunk. She admits what regular Gina doesn’t have the energy to.”

“I’ll drink to that.” Amy, eyes closed as she laughs, hits her glass against Jake’s. Her action nearly jostles the whiskey onto the floor, but its risk is lost within a sea of laughter. “To us!”

* * *

“What’s this I hear about your pact?” Holt asks, talking over the guitar riff of ‘Defying Gravity’ in the background (“Boyle! You have to harmonize!” Gina yells, turning down the volume) as he walks to Amy. She’s up to two drinks by now, her voice loud enough to shatter glass.

“Oh, _that,”_ Amy laughs, catching hold of Jake’s hand as he tries to walk away. She whispers something into his ear to keep him close, evidence of the liquor running through her veins. “We’re, uh, marrying each other in ten years’ time. See?” She waves her hand in Holt’s face, reaching across the bar to do so.

“Babe, I can stay if you really want-”

“I like the sound of that,” Amy hiccups, pulling Jake closer to her. “The nickname _and_ the offer. You want to go back to mine?”

“I should probably leave-” Holt objects, stepping back. His two best detectives are currently sprawled across the barstools, close enough to break quite a few precinct rules about public indecency. Above the starting chords to ‘Alexander Hamilton’, (“the Wiest infection means we have to have musical theatre night!”) Jake giggles, his laugh lines showing. Amy’s perched upon his lap, her hands cupping his face.

“Okay, okay, we’re gonna go home. But before we do that, I hafta show you the ring! Amy didn’t drive all the way to frickin’ Livingston, New _Joisey_ for nothing.” Jake nods like a bobblehead, eyes bleary with hope, as he holds his left hand out. Amy hangs onto his neck like they’re dancing and he just dipped her. “Aw, captain, do we have the same kind?”

“Yes, I suppose,” Holt mumbles. “I should really see how everyone else is-”

“You should! We’re going!” Amy calls, slinging her purse over her shoulder. “Come on, Jake, we should get a cab.”

“We’re going to your apartment, right?”

“Oh, _definitely._ It’s closer.” Amy winks, tugging at Jake’s hand, and they’re off. “Goodnight! I have some … other matters to attend to.”

* * *

“So, what are we?” Amy asks, buckling her seatbelt in the backseat of the cab. “I know I was pretty wild over at the bar, but my head’s cleared a bit since then. I don’t want to mess up, you know?”

“I know. I don’t want to ruin things between us.” Jake gets in after her, slamming the car door shut. “It, um, may or may not have come to my mind, that there’s a _slight_ possibility that I could be … into you. Romantic stylez.”

“Same here,” Amy murmurs, taking Jake’s hand in hers from across the middle seat. “We’ve known each other for, like, ten years? And I know we have the whole pact and all, but it’s so far. It’s so serious.”

“Friends with benefits?” Jake suggests, his face twisting uncomfortably as he speaks. “I mean, I’m definitely interested in you, but I really don’t want to change our friendship. I don’t want it to fall apart.”

“Well, we can be friends with benefits. The benefit would just be the marriage pact. Maybe sex, too.”

“We’re friends with only one benefit? Two at most?” Jake grins, blushing beneath the city’s amber-lit streetlamps. He hopes she can’t see, but his ears are turning red. The moon reflects off of his ring as the cabbie speeds up, pretending he isn’t hearing this.

“Well, there’ll be more when-” Amy fumbles. _“If_ we get married. Tax benefits. Insurance. Kids. A joint bank account. Sex again.”

“I like how you put the easiest benefit last.”

“I like how much you quieted once I sat on your lap at the bar.”

“Shut _up,_ I can’t help it if I fidget when you-”

“Sure,” Amy flirts, running her hand through Jake’s hair and pulling him in for a long-overdue kiss. She can feel his heart beating through his flannel shirt, can hear the laugh he lets out once she pulls away. “You can’t _help_ it. Happens to the best of us.”

“Oh, what, _you’re_ the best of us?” Jake cocks an eyebrow.

“Well, if you can be fooled by a little foreplay at a local bar from yours truly-”

“Foreplay, hm?”

“Well, it’s been a while since I had sex, I can’t wait forever-”

“Excuses, excuses,” Jake remarks, nonetheless kissing her again before they depart. The cab driver demands a pretty large tip for sitting through their ‘what are we?’ conversation, to whom Amy inadvertently gives a few counterfeit bills from her last case. Whether or not she realizes, it’s out of her hands.

Their cab driver takes the two twenties and tries to fill up his gas tank, only to be questioned by the staff at Shell for suspicious activity. In about ten seconds, Doug Judy will have the sudden and divine inspiration (really, the type driven by a ploy to avoid the cops as long as he can) to begin a life of crime.

* * *

“Damn, you really weren’t kidding about the paintings,” Jake comments, slipping his leather jacket off and throwing it onto the couch. “Is that you as a mermaid? Nice seashell bra.”

“Oh, is that more foreplay?” Amy jokes, taking off her jacket and lazily tossing it off to the side.

“If you want it to be.” Jake’s smirk falters as Amy stares at the ground, her tennis shoes black against the dull brown. “Ames, if you’re not in the mood, I get it. I don’t want you to be uncomfortable.”

“It’s not you. It’s just been a while, and we’re drunk, and I don’t want to overcomplicate all this.” Amy explains, somber. “And I _know,_ four-drink Amy can be a bit of a perv, but she means well. Sorry about stringing you along.”

“We could just stay up, sober up together if you want.” His eyes can’t help but trail over to her hand, a simple silver band and its garnet stark against her skin.

“That’s a good idea.” Amy grins, pulling at the hem of her blouse and unbuttoning it with a blush. She dons an old t-shirt thrown over the couch, left over from last night, and offers Jake the other. He gapes for a second, head jet-lagged a few seconds behind because Amy drove for hours to get him a ring and she probably stayed up tossing the ring box around, the way he had for months 一 Nana left it to him in the will, saying he’d love it like she did.

After a second, Amy throws her old academy shirt in his face. It’s balled-up and wrinkled but smells like her moisturizer, something he remembers from middle-school sleepovers and road trips spent with his feet up on the dashboard.

“Hey, are you gonna change, or do you want to just stare past my shoulder?”

“Sorry.” Jake spins the ring around his finger for a second. “I was just thinking, that’s all. I may or may not want to marry you.”

Amy holds back a smile, her ears turning pink as she drops her gaze. “I … may or may not want to marry you, too. Why’d you think I was so insistent at Shaw’s?”

“Oh, like you didn’t want to come back here for sex, the _second_ benefit out of two?”

“Shut up.”

 _“You_ didn’t shut up when you were all over me.” Jake raises an eyebrow before shrugging his flannel shirt off. “Give a guy a little warning, won’t you? There _are_ ways to invite your friend over to your apartment without turning them on.”

“Sure there are. Come on, Mr. Santiago, let’s go into the art room.”

“Why do I have to take your name, Amy _Peralta?_ You have seven brothers, I’m an only child!”

“Foreplay.”

Amy tugs him into the gallery with surprising confidence, given the drinks running through her system and the fact that she’d (maybe) take his last name and (definitely) marry him. Her oversized white t-shirt is spotted with watercolors left over from years past, soon to grow dappled with tears of joy and the spill that happens when Jake stops her from drinking paint water.

Their engagement rings are left in a coffee mug by the door, safe from the collateral damage of their creativity. The thin paintbrush behind Amy’s ear falls to the ground when Jake finally kisses her at four in the morning; her shirt is off and her hair falls in a messy wave along the curve of her shoulderblade and she doesn’t know how much _longer_ she’ll have to model until he sighs and mutters something about fringe benefits before pulling her in.

“Well, it’s been a while since I had sex,” he grumbles, one hand cradling her cheek and the other on her waist. “I can’t wait forever, and especially not for you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fun fact: this chapter was intended to be a lot longer but i can't compare to halloveen (halLOVEen what a dorky lovely title) and the rest'll just be in chaper 3


	3. three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s a strangely configured thing, their friendship, all Jekyll and no Hyde.

Amy’s hands are halfway up her head, adjusting a paintbrush cautiously sitting in the crook of her right ear. She won’t be surprised if runaway streaks of blue paint later appear in her hair. It’s not the first time and it won’t be the last, she thinks, when Jake stills and sighs, wiping sweat from his forehead. The painting’s supposed to look nonchalant; this interaction is anything but. His eyes are fixed upon Amy’s bare shoulder (“you don’t have to _model,_ I can always look up references!”) as she turns in her seat, asking about angles and lighting and a dozen other things she picked up from art history class.

It’s all a bit of a blur as soon as Amy loosens the scrunchie around her messy hair, the artist vibe minimalizing just a tad. Eyeliner’s smudgy around the edges of Amy’s eyelids and there might be a smear of lipstick on the side of her face, a complementary shade to the watercolors left on her temple from last night. She’s so pretty, his heart might snap in his chest like a rubber band. Jake can still see paint drying on the back of her palm 一 a miniature palette, a sporadic and saturated mix 一 as Amy turns around and straightens her back.

“Is this okay?” Amy asks, gazing out the dark window and wondering how long it’ll be until the sun rises.

The end of the paintbrush juts along her ear, perfectly balanced the way only she could persuade, and he can tell she’s comfortable despite this being her first time modeling. She kicks her feet along the slats of the chair, youthful and energetic in the midst of midnight, before pulling her legs into criss-cross. Fuck, he’s going to have a hard time finishing this piece.

“It feels really nice. Does it look good from your side?”

Ordinarily, he’d make a joke about sex tapes, but it’s too late and they’re too sober to stand it. So Jake swallows back a long-overdue compliment, muttering something about form and function. Amy Santiago is a stark Vermeer, all gold light and soft, cornflower blue details as Jake begins.

Her SAMSAM jersey lays in a pile on the floor, forgotten because they’d each prefer to push it out of their minds and pretend as if two best friends aren’t kidding themselves right now. As if Amy isn’t sitting in a black bra and Nike shorts and she _definitely_ isn’t missing her engagement ring, missing it flicker under the lights and weigh down her left hand. As if Jake isn’t standing in borrowed sweatpants and Amy’s oversized NYPD academy shirt, thinking about police codes and last year’s arrest records to keep from getting turned on.

(He’s had a sex dream which may or may not have been about Amy, and he can’t help but think about that dream right now. He’d like to make a bruise so dark it might as well be painted on her hip; he’s plenty willing to kiss her behind the ear, except that stupid paintbrush won’t budge and he ~~can’t~~ won’t, either.)

“Looks fine to me. Better than fine.” Jake manages to get a smooth seven words out before choking on his breath. “It’s 一 you’re, I mean 一 no, I mean _it,_ it’s all … good.”

“Yeah?” Amy replies shakily, her voice a little high-pitched as she fumbles with her hands in her lap. She misses her ring, safe against her finger; more than that, she wishes she could see Jake as he paints. He’s probably frowning asymmetrically and squinting right about now (that’s his ‘brooding artist’ face, she knows) and he’ll start to click his tongue once he starts wrapping up.

“Yeah. Just hold still.”

He takes longer than expected to complete the work of art, protesting whenever Amy starts to turns around. By now, her contacts are starting to dry out and her shoulders are stiffening and her crossed legs are falling asleep 一 more than that, her imagination’s running in all directions, wondering just _what_ is on that cursed canvas.

Shutting her eyes, Amy thinks about the last few hours, thinks about grabbing Jake by the collar and dragging him inside the bathroom at Shaw’s, only one of the many things that could’ve happened but didn’t. In her head, she recalls sitting on his lap and running her fingers up his thigh, nearly asking whether that was his gun or he was just happy to see her. Given his stilted laughter, she can only assume the latter.

Jake clicks his tongue through this reverie of hers, so busy trying not to think about Amy draping herself over his legs at the bar he doesn’t even notice he’s close to finishing up. A few feet over, her mind fixated on the same moment, Amy hides a grin at the prospect of finally seeing the painting she’d been waiting for.

“Ames? Ready?”

Her heart flips a little as she leaves the stepstool running, skipping all the way from the window to the door to her painter, her friend, her silver lining. Viewing the sketches on her whiteboard walls (“wait, you mean you can _draw_ on them and erase, just like that? Where was this stuff when I was a kid?!”) messily etched, Amy tears up a little.

“If you don’t mind,” Amy looks up from the painting to Jake, hands still dappled with color, “I think I’m gonna keep this for the rest of my life.”

“If you don’t mind,” Jake chokes back a laugh, “That’s the best thing I’ve ever heard, but I’m not even done yet.”

“Then why’d you call me over?”

“I wanted to talk to you. I missed you,” Jake admits, picking up his brush and washing it in paint water. “Besides, you could use a stretch before you sit back down.” 

“Back _down?!_ There’s no way I’m returning to that chair when you’re this far along. Let me help.” Amy steps forward, knocking her bare shoulder against Jake’s as she pulls the paintbrush from her ear. Biting her nails, a bad habit she hasn’t forgotten since grade school, she shoves past her fiancé (there’s no reason to call him that, she reminds herself) for the palette. “You look just about done.”

“Well, you never know-”

“Lies,” Amy dismisses, picking up the canvas with feather-light touch and setting it aside. “Just let me paint something new. Hop up on that stepstool, won’t you? Try sitting still for a while.”

Jake runs a hand through his hair before agreeing, silently but completely, pulling funny faces before Amy gets out the _nice_ watercolors; she means business, he realizes, so he manages to stop fidgeting for all of half an hour. By the time Amy calls him over, Jake’s back aches strangely (he’s too young to complain about this and too old to reverse it, what a terrible age he is!) but his head is clearer than it’s felt in forever.

That’s just what modeling does to him, he supposes, and he wonders how Amy could ever hate three hours of “move your head a little to the left, please” and “no, _you_ move your head, Michelangelo.” Three hours of watching Amy cracking art puns and, even better, seeing the excitement on her face as she explains their history.

“It looks … how’d you even _do_ this?”

Amy takes a step back, frowning. “Thanks a lot?” Above the conversation, a car alarm sounds in the distance. It’s a shriek of sorts, not so much ghastly as unwanted, and the whine fades with distance and with the night. 

“No, no, I mean it in a good way! I swear, you’re more talented than you believe,” Jake protests, stooping down to the easel and mirroring the painting’s expression. “Please, will you be my model?”

“If you’re asking,” Amy pauses, hands trailing to untie her smock, “of course.” Her skin’s marked with paint, soft shades dashed and dotted as if a Pollock, lonesome and goosebumped in accordance with frigid art-room air. The trail of police codes (10-70, fire alarm, 10-71, advise nature of fire) starts again in Jake’s mind, intensifying as Amy sits down and asks if he’s ready. 

He shakes the runaway thoughts away.

They don’t quite return until it’s several hours later, the sunrise flickering in through the single-pane windows in Amy’s living room. Her head’s nestled into his bare chest as she talks in her sleep, something about math camp and calculator races; he hasn’t felt this complete for a long time, and Amy breaks _that_ record when she wakes up and initiates round two.

Thank goodness for friends with _two_ benefits.

* * *

“So, to be clear, we’re publically engaged and socially … doing it?” Amy’s words stumble forth, not quite sure of their direction. She sits up on the couch and pulls her knees close to her chest, a blanket littering the ground next to yesterday’s clothes.

“If you’d, um, like.” Jake’s voice carries from the kitchen, still a little shaken with the suddenness of all this. “If you’re willing to know me that way.”

“That’s a good plan.”

“Good?”

 _“Good_ as in ‘of course’? Or _good_ like you’re unsure?”

“...the first one.”

She can tell he’s bad at this, trying his best to mask the shiver behind his cautious words, so she keeps her mouth shut during Stranger Things (“there’s _no_ way I’m going on Twitter, Jake! Gina’s live-tweeting all of season two!”) as they eat cup noodles on the couch. There’s a tangible gap in the open air as the credits roll. They don’t mention it until afterward, when Amy drives away wearing Jake’s oldest, most faded flannel shirt and he mumbles something about letting her take more clothes from now on.

“What was that, Peralta? Didn’t hear you,” she teases.

“I _said,_ if you really wanted to, you could wear more plaid.” His face is pink at this point, hands jammed into his pockets in the musty parking garage. “It’s a nice look on you. Don’t make me repeat that.”

“I don’t need to. One time’s enough to lord it over you forever,” Amy says. “Wait, is this a food stain on the shirt, or is that lipstick from last night?”

When Jake leans in to double-check, Amy pulls him in by the collar and kisses him before she steps into the Mercedes and turns the key in the ignition. “Trick question. It’s paint.”

“I’ve never been so glad to be wrong,” Jake murmurs. He walks back to his apartment after she drives away, taking a shower; the water turns blue and gold and black before it washes down the drain, erasing everything from last night but the night itself. It’s exhausting to miss her so much after having pulled her close the night before, but it’s real nonetheless. The lingering memory of Amy’s whispers (“why are your walls so thin?!”) lull Jake to sleep. He wakes up missing her again.

* * *

“So, sis, you think you’ll marry him?” Alex Santiago, the youngest son, pipes up from across the table. He’s the first to speak up after Amy told everyone her news.

Every year, there are birthday lunches for the ten Santiagos. It’s taboo to miss the milestones (“every five years!” “no, every ten!”), so Amy drove up to her parents’ two-story house in Jersey for the afternoon. By now, she’s used to questions, but none this serious.

“Um, probably.” Amy holds the anxious look on her face back, reaching to her left hand only to realize her engagement ring’s still sitting in the coffee mug at home. “Is that bad?”

“Not bad at all,” her mother coaxes, giddy. She’s probably planning the wedding already, ready to call the perfect venue as soon as she finishes putting the dishes away.

Victor smiles. “I’ll be happy to walk you down the aisle, mija. Just don’t trip like your mom did.”

“We said we wouldn’t bring it up!”

“There’s a statute of limitations,” her father teases. “I was a cop, I know the law.”

Amy knows her statute is a day less than ten years, and she etches that date mercilessly into her mind. It’s the deadline in her life calendar. It’s the day everything changes. She sits at the lunch table, wrapped in her favorite (read: only) flannel shirt, and prepares herself to spend the next ten birthday lunches pining for her fiancé.

Just in case, she practices walking down a makeshift aisle in her kitchen. Can’t trip on the big day, can she?

* * *

It’s a strangely configured thing, their friendship, all Jekyll and no Hyde. The second time Jake walks into Amy’s apartment, having heard the panic in her voice over the phone, he waits for the tic in her hands to settle before he pulls a blanket across her legs and falls asleep with her head buried into his chest. The third time, there’s a lower, different urge, and he ends the night sneaking back into his apartment so he doesn’t wear old clothes to work the next day.

Their relationship changes with the time of day, innocent ‘good morning!’ texts turning into those sequestered in the space between two words: come over. Amy toys with their boundary in the quietest of ways, leaning over his desk and making jokes only he’d understand. The day Jake plays a few tricks of his own, Amy pulls him back to her apartment (“it’s closer!”) on their lunch break. They’re almost late driving back to the Nine-Nine, as if rumpled hair and disheveled clothes aren’t enough of a clue.

These days, he doesn’t wake up missing Amy anymore. Her toothbrush is next to his in the bathroom (“Ames, haven’t you ever heard of over-brushing?” “that’s not real, is it?!”) and her pantsuits hidden in the back of his closet; her recipe box 一 she’s _getting_ there, she insists, when anyone pokes fun 一 sits in the kitchen cabinet he couldn’t ever fill.

“Ames? You think you’ll still want to marry me after, like, eight more years?”

“Yeah, I think so,” she exhales, deep and breathless. “Besides, it’s _seven.”_

His laugh lines show. “What, are you counting down?”

“Maybe.” She pauses. “What’s it to you?”

“It’s … something.”

When Amy mutters that ‘all Jekyll and no Hyde’ line to Jake across the dinner table, he adds another book to the list of Things to Do For Amy. She isn’t so sure it’s a list as much as it’s a bunch of sticky-note reminders somewhere up in his mind.

* * *

Things to Do For Jake. 

1\. Watch Avatar (no, not the James Cameron film, the TV show. He says it’s really good.)  
2\. Get invited to one of those Taylor Swift secret sessions. Much more difficult than #1.  
2a. Substitute: go to a concert.  
3\. Throw out his awful TMNT boxers, even if they make you laugh every week when he takes them off.  
4\. Take him to Lush. He never gets around to it, and he’s obsessed with bath bombs. Will he initiate sex in the bathtub??? Probably.  
5\. Buy him a pet turtle. Graham Crackers died a long time ago. He says he wants to name it Maximus.  
5a. Side note: don’t take him to the store when you get the turtle. He might buy 4 and name them after the teenage mutant ninja turtles. See #3.


	4. four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Amy spends hours filling sketchbooks with lazy, loopy drawings of everything she sees. It’s him most mornings, her boyfriend’s collection of flannels lining the closet or his badge lacing its way across his neck.

Jake doesn’t exactly understand the mechanics of it all (title of their sex tape), can’t exactly pull all the moments together in his head, can’t keep it all in one piece. He just wants to thank whoever came up with ‘friends with benefits’, late-night texts and moonlit existentialism and spur-of-the-moment innuendoes all wrapped up into the loose fabric of this label.

The first year is laughter, elbowing each other during movie nights to which nobody else in the precinct is invited (“on the _off_ chance we want to have sex, you know, given our record”) and biting back grins at the mention of inside jokes. It’s sitting on the edges of their seats, pulling close and drifting apart, ‘I miss you’s and ‘welcome home’s. The day after Jake’s eight-day stakeout with Charles, Amy tackles him to the bed and kisses him and listens to a story about broken windows and writing on walls. He hadn’t quite realized how much he missed her, but she makes him waffles with extra butter and syrup and he murmurs, “I wish you’d been there, Ames” before digging in.

“Me too,” she replies, sincere, his presence so nicely filling the vapid gap in her heart, a process she couldn’t even begin to describe. And yet he can’t fit into the categories with which she set out, ‘boyfriend’ here and ‘fiancé’ there. He is only an enigma flitting through her days, dusting them with time and capturing her attention temporarily. He is a snapshot, she an animation, people nothing if not frozen in everything he draws.

A dancer, curly-haired and gloomy, makes her way into Jake’s sketchbook. There’s a signature slash across one of her eyebrows (“I don’t see the resemblance,” Rosa mutters, thinking of the pointe shoes sitting in her closet at home) and her arms are forever in the air. Stone-like. Graceful.

The girl is only ever drawn once, and only ever drawn perfectly. Amy fills an entire journal with attempts, each numbered, each wrong. Dancer 132 has eyes too round and an expression too kind; dancer 280 contorts her face as she smiles and one of her ears is higher than the other; dancer 373 would’ve been _the one_ if only the wrong eyebrow hadn’t been scarred and her chin had been less round. At the end, she flips through the pages in frustration, each dancer changing position, each with a slightly different face. The girls shift from arabesque to plié to pas de bourrée, so different from the drawing they’d been modeled upon, seemingly performing a farewell dance.

Amy falls asleep that night wondering if this, too, is a frozen moment, and if everything will fall apart the minute something changes. If someone from the precinct finds out, if she says she loves him, she knows they are a liability. They will sink or swim, and she can’t decide for the both of them.

The first year, Amy’s heart begins to weigh itself down.

They find a coffeeshop far enough from their apartments that nobody from the Nine-Nine can recognize them. So they sit under a doe-brown umbrella at a table made of bronze and glass, sipping their lattes and frappuccinos with a certain nonchalance only people with a ten-year-long marriage pact have ever mastered.

Their server, Wendy, always greets them with a kind smile as she adjusts her crooked nametag. Wendy doesn’t know that Amy’s mother has already written out a list of Peralta-Santiago baby names 一 for girls, Rachel, Claire, or Maya; for boys, Benjamin or Jacob, Jr. She doesn’t know that Jake and Amy always stop for coffee on their way home from the precinct, because _home_ means something other than acting like good friends and averting each other’s gazes. Wendy simply picks up as many double shifts as she can (millennials have it the worst, she swears, tying on a green apron covered in sponsorship logos) and grins as one detective tugs another into the café day after day.

Jake plucks a pen from out of nowhere and starts to draw Amy one day, scratches and strokes transforming the napkin. She blushes at the sight of her simplified face and, on the way out, makes sure to press it into her copy of Pride and Prejudice. Wendy notices as one picture turns into hundreds, petunias and police badges bleeding through the paper.

The doubt seems to disappear like a wall of fog dissipating into the sky.

“We should talk,” Amy murmurs earnestly, tugging at his sleeve.

“Wait, Ames, just a sec. Check out the barista, Angie.” Jake cuts her off, adrenaline coursing through his veins, head lost in the clouds.

Angie passes Wendy a cup of coffee on the house (“four sugars and three creams, just the way you like it”), the message on top asking her out to dinner, and Wendy’s excited shriek rings through the coffeeshop. On his way out, Jake smiles at Angie, stuffing a ten in the tip jar. “My fiancée and I have really been rooting for you two.”

The aforementioned fiancée swats him, a deathlike glare on her face, and Wendy wonders what could be the matter. She only hears Amy hiss, “You can’t _tell_ people that!” as she steps out. The door swings shut and Wendy drinks her coffee, heartbeat rising (that could just be the sugar and cream pumping through her bloodstream, though.)

Amy presses the napkin from the café into her scrapbook when she gets home, not bothering to write a message inside as she usually does. It’s not like it’ll be nice, anyways.

She finds Jake sprawled out on the couch, pressing a soft kiss to his cheek. “I like being engaged to you,” Amy says, eyes somber. “Sorry about that thing at the coffeeshop.”

“Amy,” he says, wrists draped on her shoulder. He’s been wearing his rose-colored glasses, but not for long enough to miss the red flags. Words override his brain, a deluge of sorts keeping him from even speaking. He tugs away from her, and only in these final moments manages to overcome the storm in his mind flooding him with uncertainty. “If something’s wrong, tell me.”

Her eyebrows crease with disdain. “Well, it’s a big change-”

“You’re not pregnant, are you?”

“See, you’re _doing_ it again! Just let me talk!”

Silence goes over the room, and goosebumps run over Amy’s arms.

“Listen, I’m tired of this vague label. I don’t want to your friend with benefits,” she explains, despondent, her hand on his shoulder as she speaks. “I want to be your regular, boring girlfriend. And if you can’t handle that, because I _know_ that wasn’t one of the things we discussed in that dark taxicab, I’ll … I’ll leave, so we can stop all this.”

She wants to crumple up against his chest, wants her tear-streaked to cheeks to blush pink as he tells her silly jokes and strokes her hair. It’s become their new normal, but Amy’s trudged past _comfortable_ and into unknown territory. She simply pulls away, stung.

“You don’t want me to stay, do you?” he asks, voice gentle. He sounds seven years old again, muttering that his dad left to his then-best friend Gina. There’s a nervous twitch in his hands, the same quality mirrored in his sober eyes.

Amy bites the inside of her cheek. Old habits die hard 一 _“Die Hard_ isn’t an old habit, Ames! That’s a saying! _This_ is a healthy obsession!” she can still hear him saying. She remembers the crack of dawn and the blur of his words as he spoke. A pang in her heart reminds her how much she misses that familiarity.

“No, I want you to,” she muses, avoiding his gaze. “Just don’t know if you will.”

Jake kisses her, truly, wholly sure of his intentions for the first time in a year, so calm and safe and known it’s almost unbearable how long it took to tell her she might just be the rest of his life.

“Don’t read the last page,” he cautions, a grin pulling at his lips, “but I stay. For the boring, regular rest of my life, for the boring, regular _love_ of my life.”

“You got it wrong,” she murmurs, her hand still up against his flannel shirt, heart so perfectly content. “It’s regular and _then_ boring. Come _on.”_

“My mistake, Ames.” He can’t help but kiss her again. “I’ll get it right the next time I’m introducing you to someone else, I promise.”

“You will do no such thing!”

The night sky catches Amy’s eye as she walks to the kitchen for a cup of coffee, fingers locked in between Jake’s the whole way, and some sort of weight lifts as she sees a car coast past the window. Moonbeams bounce off of the paint, glinting off of every contour, and she knows it’s the silver lining between all these storm clouds that she’s with him right now.

“You want to go up to my studio?” Jake asks, eyes bright. “I know it isn’t the same as the _iconic_ place where I painted your picture and … did some other stuff with you, but I’d like to paint all the same.”

Amy blushes when he says ‘other’, takes his hand, walks in. There are three separate paintings of a dancer on the desk, her expression dark and eyes devoted, almost alive on each canvas. Next to the portraits, tens of hundreds of sketches of a familiar-looking woman in either a pantsuit or a blouse sit on the table. Her face is achingly familiar, eyes nostalgic and only rarely framed in glasses that take up half her face. She’s reading in half the sketches, glancing down devotedly at a hardback and sprawled across the bed. In the other half, she’s at work, a flashlight perched on her shoulder and a bulletproof vest secure on her body. Amy asks to take a page home for the scrapbook, to which Jake glares and hands her a sheet from the pile before she snaps a picture of all the drawings altogether.

“I can’t wait to be your regular, boring girlfriend,” she says, gloating.

“You already are, nerd,” Jake replies, rolling his eyes.

* * *

The second year is dedication. Amy spends hours filling sketchbooks with lazy, loopy drawings of everything she sees. It’s him most mornings, her boyfriend’s collection of flannels lining the closet or his badge lacing its way across his neck. They’re more in sync now, and they’ve since moved in together. They know ‘we should get coffee where we used to’ means ‘i miss your face’, and ‘it’s been a while, you know?’ is a cry for help.

The day Jake spots his leather jacket and favorite sneakers scrawled into the latest page of Amy’s drawings, he spins her around with one hand and tells her he loves her. She reciprocates, blushing, before asking if he could buy her some tennis shoes like his. (It’s been twenty-two years, but Amy Santiago’s finally giving in to Jake’s taste in footwear. He sends her six links in an email titled ‘found on the Dark Web’ before they even arrive at the precinct.)

“You’re a dork, you know that?” he asks, looking at Amy as she constructs a collage for each brand of shoe.

She rolls her eyes before cutting out more reviews and pasting them onto the poster board. “Shoes are an _investment!”_

The day that Jenny McFadden sends over Amy’s pair of Kickz™ For Her, Jake and Amy drive out to the coffeeshop to celebrate. They haven’t visited as much ever since they came public and told everyone they were together.

_“So...yeah. Amy and I. Doin’ it. All that jazz.”_

_“There’s no way you can say that in front of the precinct, babe,” Amy says, rolling her eyes at Jake’s reflection in the mirror. “Charles’ll break out into song before crying.”_

Angie writes ‘John McClane’ with a curlicue on the last letter, tapping her girlfriend on the shoulder and whispering something about ‘that dorky married couple’ being back. The café staff haven’t noticed, but the rings have been left in the coffee mug for months. 

_“What, I’m your ex-fiancé now?”_

_“No, you shouldn’t say that, Jake,” Amy admonishes, frowning. The rings, one simple silver band and another adorned with a garnet, clink as the fall into the cup. “You’ve just been demoted, that’s all.”_

_“Yeah, from fiancé to boyfriend. It’s a step backwards!”_

_“Well, technically, your official title is regular,_ boring _boyfriend.”_

Halfway through the year, Wendy walks into work, tying her apron behind her back and shyly showing off the engagement ring on her left hand as she takes orders. Amy folds up a ten-dollar bill, sticks it in the tip jar, and says, “I’m overjoyed for you two. Have a good wedding,” on her way out. Her eyes are sincere, almost watery, and she holds Jake’s hand tightly as the door creaks shut and the bell overhead rings. 

She gazes wistfully at the coffee cup, gathering dust by the art studio, as she gets home. Jake doesn’t say anything, simply leaning against the doorframe as she pulls out a sheet of watercolor paper. It nearly rips as she excitedly sets it on the table, streaks of black paint running like rainwater down the page. At the end, there’s a blurred storm of a girl there, arms held in the air, pointe shoes on her feet, hair a curled mess as she spins. 

It’s a replica, Jake murmurs, as he proudly presses the page into a picture frame. Amy signs her name with a flourish in the corner and proceeds to flick through her sketchbook of dancers with a smug smile on her face. 

* * *

[TW: Mentions of Car Accidents]

The third year is casualties. On New Year’s Day, Amy wakes up alone, tangled in her comforter, windows frosted with silver. Clad in blue flannel two sizes too large, she regretfully leaves the warmth of her bed for the kitchen. The griddle clicks on as easily as it ever has, pancake batter with the consistency of honey dripping down the edge of the glass as it pours. 

Halfway across town, there’s a gut-wrenching screech, then a slam, then airbags deploy and sirens fall across the frequency. 

Breakfast burns as the phone rings, and something feels stilted until Amy drops the pitcher. Glass shards forge the ground a battlefield, batter like a mudslide, only mirroring the murmur in her heart and the shudder in her hands. 

_“What do you mean, I can’t see him?”_

_“You’re his partner at work, ma’am, but this wasn’t for a case. He was off-duty, and so were you. Are you a relative? A significant other? If not, I’m afraid I have to ask you to step aside.”_

_“We-” The words seem to silence themselves. “We were engaged,” she lies._

_“I’m sorry, miss, but that can’t guarantee a spousal right. It’s not the same.”_

_“It’s practically the same.”_

_“I’m sorry.”_

* * *

The third year is a casualty, a storm, heart monitors flat-lining in the background of every one of Amy Santiago’s dreams. They never used to be all about him. She dreamt of silver linings, of sea-green mermaids, of the undecipherable, and yet her dreams are all parallel universes now. Sometimes he wakes up and sometimes he doesn’t; sometimes he wakes up despite never saying a word or moving an inch again; sometimes he speaks, and she hears all her worst flaws at once; sometimes he moves, and he checks out of the hospital and out of her life. 

“Ames,” he consoles, “I’m fine. It’s been a month. I’m making a full recovery, remember?” 

A tear slips down her cheek, dampening the pillow. “I know, I just can’t get over it.” 

He hates hearing her like this, despondent to the point of paranoia, afraid to see him go when he drives away alone. He hates waking her up in the middle of the night, panicked and frozen in time, begging for the memories to go away. 

The only good thing is her recovery, the way she halts when her breathing hitches and clamps her fists tight, fingernails making crescent moons on her palms. She keeps her mind off of what she doesn’t want to know. Jake feels a striking pang of guilt when she’s too distracted to notice one of the rings has gone missing, now safety tucked into its old velvet box rather than the coffee mugs. And it's with coffee that he begins to plan his proposal, coffee and a message scrawled on top. The day she says yes, he changes his order from a latte for 'John McClane' to that for 'Jake Santiago.' 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for a dork I stressed out while writing this. see, didn't it resolve itself? (p.s. did you ever actually find your glasses?)

**Author's Note:**

> thank you so much for reading!! kudos/comments are greatly appreciated. i'm sadtiagos on tumblr if you ever want to drop by!!


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